INTRODUCTION 3 



movements and partially incapacitated me during the final stages 

 of the journey. Horses died of starvation or poison, and the men 

 of the party were running perilously short of food the journey 

 having been prolonged beyond our calculations when we reached 

 Somerset on 3rd April, 1880. 



Kennedy's maps and journals (1848) perished with him, and 

 what we know of his expedition is taken (as far north as the Pascoe 

 River) from the narrative written by William Carron, one of the 

 three survivors, and (north of the Pascoe) from the " statement " 

 of the black boy Jackey-Jackey, another of the survivors and the 

 only one of the thirteen men to make the complete journey from 

 Rockingham Bay to Somerset. The Geological and Prospecting 

 Party's route only coincided for a short distance, from the head of 

 the Jardine River to its westward bend, with that of the Jardine 

 Brothers (1865). Day after day, during the whole of my journey, 

 I was mapping the mountain ranges, rivers and other features of 

 the country, checking my latitudes by star-observations whenever 

 the night sky was clear enough, and as far as charting was concerned 

 we were in virgin ground. 



My report on the two expeditions was completed at my 

 Townsville office in the winter of 1880 and sent to the Minister 

 for Mines, Brisbane, with the relative map, which had taken a 

 good deal of time, subject to interruptions by other duties. The 

 report was printed and officially issued on I4th September, 1881, 

 without my having had any opportunity of seeing it through the 

 press, and to my astonishment the map which might have been 

 supposed to be of the first importance was omitted. What 

 became of the map and of my " office copy " will be seen in 

 Chapter LXVII. 



After the map had reached Brisbane and before my report was 

 published, my map had been reduced to a smaller scale and 

 embodied in official maps issued by the Department of Lands. 

 In that form, however, my charting was open, in parts, to an 

 interpretation which I could never have sanctioned. 



In 1913, when I had been out of the government service for 

 about fourteen years, and when for the first time some degree of 

 leisure had begun to fall to my share, I commenced to prepare a 

 revised and corrected issue of the report, with its map recon- 

 structed from my notes, with the intention of offering it to the 

 Government for republication (the report itself having been long 

 out of print). Some progress had been made when my friend 

 James Dick, of Cooktown, sent me proofs of a pamphlet in which 

 he proposed to summarise the narrative of the Geological and 

 Prospecting Expeditions. When I had gone over the proofs, 

 correcting them only in so far as statements of fact were concerned, 

 I fully realised how misleading my original narrative must have 

 been, misprinted as it was, and unaccompanied by the map which 



